Sound and the Sublime in Sophocles' Oedipus at Colonus: The Limits of Representation

Abstract

This article undertakes an analysis of the deployment of sound in Sophocles' Oedipus at Colonusthat is grounded in a material aesthetics. Oedipus' blindness elevates sound's significance, and the play simultaneously emphasizes the power of voice ( sunthēmata, here termed "auditory recognition tokens") and the ineffable (the aphatosthunderbolt of Zeus), phenomena that serve, respectively, to draw the audience into a close sensory sympathy with the dramatic world and to emphasize its ultimate inaccessibility. This exaggerated distance and proximity evokes an ambivalent affective experience, identified here with "the sublime" à laLonginus but also Lyotard, with a corollary in Kristeva's abject.